It's true that you can get laptops for under $1k, but it's quite a bit harder to find a 13.3" one like the MacBook for much less
Funny you should mention that. I've been saying for a while that when my current laptop finally dies, I plan to get a Macbook. Not for the looks, the spec or the OS, but simply because I wanted a 13.3 inch form factor. I carry my laptop around a lot, so a 17'' monster is out of the question, but I also use it as my primary machine, so an ultra portable is no use either. 13.3'' is, for me, the sweet spot between portability and usability. But no one seemed to make them except apple, so it looked like the macbook was the best option.
Lately though, I've noticed more and more 13.3'' laptops showing up in stores. A quick search on dabs turns up these results. As you can see, they have twelve 13.3'' laptops that are cheaper than a macbook. The Toshiba U400 for example, compares very favourably with the cheapest macbook in terms of specs. The macbook had a faster processor, but the toshiba has a DVD writer and is lighter, so it's pretty much a toss up. On price though, the Toshiba trounces the apple. £498 against £699. A £200 pound difference. Looks like I won't be buying a mac after all.
I won't get into the the relative merits and value of vista compared to OSX. I'd be formatting it and installing Linux anyway.
No, but I still have a copier in my basement that can copy any book I feel like, yet publishers aren't making me verify my books. I even have a scanner and therefore could put an entire book on Limewire.
Really? You have a copier in you basement that will make a flawless and totally identical copy of any book, printed on the exact same paper at the exact same quality, professionally bound in a hard backed cover? And the copier will then redistribute these perfect copies to as many people as you want, at zero cost (beyond what you already pay your ISP)? Wow.
Yes, you could scan it and stick it on Limewire, but you are still not distributing a functionally equivalent copy the way you are with a game ISO.
I should point out here that I despise DRM, I download movies and music with absolutely no regard for the rights of copyright holders, and I will never pay money for any content with DRM that I cannot trivially bypass (which is why I don't use itunes). But your arguments were ridiculous, and I felt that should be pointed out.
Just FYI, Vim is not a GPL application. It has its own license, which the authors describes as a "charity-ware" license, although it is GPL compatible. Otherwise, a quite superb and informative post.
I know you said that largely in jest, but in fairness to the figure collectors they don't claim that their figures are actually endowed with the power of the force. That might be the only explanation for some of the properties ascribed to these cables.
Well, this may be a shot in the dark, but maybe, just maybe, people find the various grinds in the game to be...fun?
I have never played WOW, but my housemate is a huge WOW addict who will regularly spend his entire weekend playing it. And I mean the entire weekend. Toilet and food breaks, but nothing else.
But the interesting thing is that he seems to derive almost no enjoyment from playing it. All he ever seems to do is complain constantly. "Oh for fucks sake, I've got to kill $x of $y!". "I've been doing this for an hour!". "Now I've got to go there!". Non-stop whining. The only positive things he ever says about his WOW playing are things like "I have X gold", or "I went up X levels this weekend".
Now as I said, I'm not a WOW player, or an MMORPG player at all, so I expect a lot of them are going to reply and tell me how wrong I am, but here's my theory. I think that some WOW players, like my house mate, do not actually enjoy playing the game. They enjoy the sense of achievement they get from having 70 levels and a shitload of virtual gold. The hours of grind required to get there are simply the price they have to pay to get that. That's why you hear so many players complaining about the "timesink". They aren't having fun. They just have to slog through it to pick up the next level.
Before you all start screaming at me, I'm not saying all MMO players are like this, just that I've noticed some are.
Your approach would tend to minimize the advancement of good ideas and encourage the advancement of bad ones.
I think you would find that his approach would minimize the advancement of poorly funded ideas and encourage the advancement of well funded ones. Their relative scientific worth would be largely irrelevant.
I think you missed his point. He wasn't saying it's not bloat, he was saying it probably has nothing to do with MS since, and I quote:
most of the adware/shareware/freeware has nothing to do with them
I mean, have you ever installed XP off a retail or corporate disc? There are virtually no apps installed. Most of the crap people complain about when they rant over free installs is actually installed by OEMs.
OK, try re-reading my post, and taking in what I'm saying. I expressly said he could rip and burn CDs on linux. The only obstacle he had was the vinyl thing. I pointed out he used a simple app with a point and click wizard, basically "click here to remove scratches". And you suggest he replace this with audacity, a pro level audio editing app. Does it have a "remove scratches button"?
Honestly, does the average person really need photoshop?
OK, stop right there. The average computer user does not exist. For example, take my dad. Most people would describe him as a fairly average user . He uses web and e-mail, writes the odd letter in word, and burns mp3s onto CDs for his car stereo. All of that could be done in Linux.
Oh, except he also records the odd vinyl album and cleans the scratches off it using a simple to use application with a step by step wizard for just that purpose. No equivalent program that I am aware of exists on Linux, so my Dad is stuck with Windows.
Or take the office were my wife works. She's a graphic designer, she regularly works on advertising campaigns that are sent to third party publications for printing. She absolutely requires photoshop, and yes, she has tried GIMP, and no, it really is not a suitable replacement for her.Now possibly the "average" office worker in her building could be moved to desktop linux ( I still think a lot of them would run into the "just one app" syndrome, but lets assume we could do it ), but my wife and quite a few other people could not, so the IT department would be stuck supporting two different systems, not a situation they would care for.
Linux is ready for the desktop. It just doesn't have the apps yet.
Absolutely correct. The vast majority of hardware you can buy today, as well as pre-existing older hardware, will work just fine under linux. However, the amount of hardware that will not work is far from insignificant.
I would guess (without evidence) that more currently existing hardware works on Linux than Windows.
Rubbish. If you had said windows vista rather than windows, then yeah, I might agree. But if we're talking about desktop hardware compatibility with XP, then certainly everything released in the last seven years should work fine. Not true of Linux. I hate to quote myself, but, as I said in another thread a while back :
I defy you to find any hardware on the shelves of a high street store that is not Windows XP compatible ( I have never used Vista, so in a break with Slashdot tradition, I'm not going to spout off about something I know nothing about). I'll bet you a months salary I can find something that won't work with Linux.
I'm not aiming this at you specifically, but far too many OSS advocates think that an acceptable response to criticisms of Linux is to say "Windows is rubbish too".
I don't care. I'm not using windows.
Several people have posted in this thread this thread saying "windows won't play flash by default" or "windows doesn't have any drivers by default". Irrelevant. Linux is supposed to be better than windows. A defect in windows is not an excuse for having the same defect in Linux.
Do you know how drivers change gears in a formula one car (stay with me here)? I only found this out the other day, but apparently they change gears by pushing buttons mounted on the back of the steering wheel. It's far quicker, and means they don't have to take their hands off the wheel to make a gear change.
So, why do the rest of us still use gear sticks? Well, that would be because we all already know how to use them. Building a car with a different gear shift mechanism, even one that offered obvious advantages, would make it harder for most people to drive, so no one does. Most customers would look at it, and decide that they did'nt want to bother learning a new system.
You can see where I'm going with this, right? Windows IS the standard for using a computer. When an office job asks for "IT Skills", it really means "Windows Skills" If you actually want to capture a large market share, you have to make things easy for windows users.
And of course different is hard. It's hard because familiar is easy, so anything else is hard in comparison. I'm a developer, I'd find it a damn sight harder to code something in a programing language I'm not familiar with than I would in, say, C++ or Perl.
Now the truth is that this all matters less and less. standard OS GUIs are all slowly converging on one another. There are only so many ways to draw rectangles and lists of options to the screen. I'm typing this on Kubuntu 8.04. If i want to open a program I click on the button in the bottom left to bring up a list of apps. If I were using windows I would cl... well, you get the picture. I can already download a deb package and install it by double clicking, just like on windows.
BTW, to the inevitable smart arse who replies to this with an example of some car that changes gears clenching your buttocks, that does not disprove the analogy. Proving that 95 percent of cars out there DO NOT change gears using a stick mounted next to the drivers seat would disprove the analogy.
If the GUI were better, we'd be programming with them.
If the CLI were the superior interface, we'd be doing desktop publishing with it.
[End Sarcasm]
The superior interface is entirely determined by the job you're trying to do and the circumstances you're doing it under. You think a CLI is always better than a GUI? OK, I have a folder containing 300 images, and I need to copy all the ones with cars in them to another folder. I can do that with a GUI in under a minute ( thumbnails of images, ctrl+click, copy paste) Try it with a CLI.
And of course, apart from some jobs just being faster in a GUI, there's also the learning curve. I can set up a wireless network with iwconfig in about 10 seconds, way faster than using a GUI, but only because I already know what to type. If I was given a different CLI config tool for setting up wireless, I would have to read the man pages and learn a new set of commands. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I could figure out any wireless set up GUI in a matter of minutes. If I only need to do it occasionally, it's not worth the investment of time and effort to learn the CLI tool.
Well I don't have to chalk it up to chance. How about this explanation: A prophecy written hundreds of years ago says that Bob will speak a certain phrase at his execution. Bob knows this, so speaks the phrase at his execution. Of course, how do you even know christ said that on the cross? Your only source is the gospels, the earliest of which was written at least fifty years after the events it describes, and which were all authored by people who had a clear bias and were seeking to promote christian belief. I would also argue that it does NOT detail exactly what happened to him. It simply says his enemies had surrounded him and pierced his hands and feet. crucifixion had been a widespread method of execution for hundreds of years prior to christs time, so a reference, in a prophecy which offers no real detail, to someone being crucified, is hardly overwhelming evidence for christs divinity. And by the way, the Psalm is written in first person and makes no specific reference to christ. Just becaus you believe it refers to christ does not make it so. It might refer to David Koresh for all you know.
I am curious about something. You seem to believe in cristianity very strongly. Why christianity? After all, every claim you make about christianity (prophecies, prophets, changing history ) could be made for any number of religions, from Islam to Zoroastrianism. What makes you so sure your choice of invisible cloud being is correct, and all the others are wrong?
The proof is Christ, a living being who lived here 2000 years ago. Whose humble life changed the course of human history(and the Roman empire)
Karl Marx's humble life changed the course of human history due to people following his teachings. Doesn't make him the son of an all powerful supernatural entity.
Since my original post spawned 22 replies, I decided to put together a quick follow up addressing some of the arguments they made..
I should probably point something out up front which I omitted from my earlier post: I do very little image editing, and what little I do is generally limited to removing some red eye or cropping a picture. The graphic designer in the family is my wife, who's work has adorned several nationally published add campaigns. If you think I dislike Gimp, talk to her.
To start with all the people who pointed out work-arounds, from separate virtual desktops to various window manager tricks, yes, all of those are possible ways to deal with the appalling choices the Gimp designers have made with their defaults, but the fact still remains that they should not be necessary. Make the default better. If I was actually in a position of being forced to work with the Gimp a lot, I would probably put it on its own virtual desktop, and set the palates to "Always on top". Whilst that is a solution, for an app to require its own virtual desktop, and some tweaking of the window manager to make the interface usable is, frankly, appalling.
A few people said that they actually like the Gimps interface, or at least that there are advantages to it. One guy said he liked it because it meant he could view an image in full screen without the palates in the way. I do appreciate that just because I prefer a particular interface, that does not necessarily make it better (quick, tell the Mac users), but when a program has a UI as unusual as the Gimp, it ought to at the very least come with an option to change to something more standard. The very fact that every time the Gimp is mentioned on Slashdot we see hundreds of posts complaining about the UI should be enough to suggest that a large proportion of the user base intensely dislike it.
Which brings me to my final point, namely why not use something else? The short answer is; because there is nothing else. GPL image editing software is pretty much limited to the Gimp. It's the default in every distro I've ever used, and nothing else even comes close. Someone mentioned Cinepaint, but I was under the impression that was geared specifically for film, correct me if I'm wrong. Krita might be a potential replacement one day, but my interest in it lasted exactly as long as it took me to find out that it had no crop tool.
Precisely because Gimp is the leading, nay default, image editor in the GPL/Linux world, it needs to have a more standardised default interface, or at least a straight forward option to switch to one.
Tune in next week, when we'll be talking about CMYK!
My understanding is that the multi window interface is actually very similar to Photoshop on the MAC. Photoshop only has a single window MDI in windows. I could be wrong, but that's the way I understand it.
I think you are wrong.
I HATE the Gimp's GUI. Absolutely, completely despise it, and here's why. Say I have a bunch of apps open, browser, music player, my home folder, and Gimp. Now, the Gimp actually has three windows, The document window, the tool browser and the layers palate (actually it can have more than that, but that's the default). Now, let's suppose that I've finished reading slashdot, and I want to carry on editing my image, so I click on the taskbar button named "image.xcf". The image I was working on is maximized, but where are my editing tools? oh, they're still minimised. Back down to the taskbar, click on the GIMP button. OK, so I select the tool I want, but wait, I'm on the wrong layer. OK, back down to the taskbar, click on the Layers,Channels button, up pops the layer selector.
OK, so so far I've had to maximize three separate windows, just to be able to edit the image. But it gets even more annoying, because you can end up with the image over the top of the tool palates, so every time you want to go back and change a tool, you have to go back down to the taskbar and select the palate window again (or alt tab).
Now the reason I think you're wrong is because last time I posted a rant like this, two Mac users pointed out that Photoshop on the Mac does not work like this. Apperently, clicking on any image open in photoshop also brings the tools into focus as well. Of course I could be wrong as well, since I have no direct experience with Photoshop on Macs.
And before anyone points out that I could just set the palates to "Always on top", yes I could, and as a matter of fact I do, but it grates on me to have to work around a programs stupid defaults. Besides, I then have to manually minimize them if I want to use another program, and then manually bring them back up after clicking on an image window. Still annoying. Clicking an image in Gimp should bring the image up along with a full set of editing tools.
How old is it? Because I also said seven years old or less. and SP1 was 2002, if memory serves, so it's at least seven years old if it's pre SP1.
Having said that, I do take your point. One massive benefit of open source is better support for older hardware. But that's not what I was arguing about. I explicitly excluded older hardware from my argument. What I was pointing out is that every piece of consumer hardware (with the obvious exception of Mac only stuff) you can buy today is supported under windows. That is not true of Linux.
Take the Apple Newton and Amiga as examples for complete abandoned systems that still have an active user base.
I know. I still have working A1200. And a working Speccy +3.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that you can get laptops for under $1k, but it's quite a bit harder to find a 13.3" one like the MacBook for much less
Funny you should mention that. I've been saying for a while that when my current laptop finally dies, I plan to get a Macbook. Not for the looks, the spec or the OS, but simply because I wanted a 13.3 inch form factor. I carry my laptop around a lot, so a 17'' monster is out of the question, but I also use it as my primary machine, so an ultra portable is no use either. 13.3'' is, for me, the sweet spot between portability and usability. But no one seemed to make them except apple, so it looked like the macbook was the best option.
Lately though, I've noticed more and more 13.3'' laptops showing up in stores. A quick search on dabs turns up these results. As you can see, they have twelve 13.3'' laptops that are cheaper than a macbook. The Toshiba U400 for example, compares very favourably with the cheapest macbook in terms of specs. The macbook had a faster processor, but the toshiba has a DVD writer and is lighter, so it's pretty much a toss up. On price though, the Toshiba trounces the apple. £498 against £699. A £200 pound difference. Looks like I won't be buying a mac after all.
I won't get into the the relative merits and value of vista compared to OSX. I'd be formatting it and installing Linux anyway.
Assuming he didn't edit it
Isn't that supposed to be, y'know, his job?
No, but I still have a copier in my basement that can copy any book I feel like, yet publishers aren't making me verify my books. I even have a scanner and therefore could put an entire book on Limewire.
Really? You have a copier in you basement that will make a flawless and totally identical copy of any book, printed on the exact same paper at the exact same quality, professionally bound in a hard backed cover? And the copier will then redistribute these perfect copies to as many people as you want, at zero cost (beyond what you already pay your ISP)? Wow.
Yes, you could scan it and stick it on Limewire, but you are still not distributing a functionally equivalent copy the way you are with a game ISO.
I should point out here that I despise DRM, I download movies and music with absolutely no regard for the rights of copyright holders, and I will never pay money for any content with DRM that I cannot trivially bypass (which is why I don't use itunes). But your arguments were ridiculous, and I felt that should be pointed out.
running GPL programs like emacs, vi and gcc,
Just FYI, Vim is not a GPL application. It has its own license, which the authors describes as a "charity-ware" license, although it is GPL compatible. Otherwise, a quite superb and informative post.
I know you said that largely in jest, but in fairness to the figure collectors they don't claim that their figures are actually endowed with the power of the force. That might be the only explanation for some of the properties ascribed to these cables.
Well, this may be a shot in the dark, but maybe, just maybe, people find the various grinds in the game to be...fun?
I have never played WOW, but my housemate is a huge WOW addict who will regularly spend his entire weekend playing it. And I mean the entire weekend. Toilet and food breaks, but nothing else.
But the interesting thing is that he seems to derive almost no enjoyment from playing it. All he ever seems to do is complain constantly. "Oh for fucks sake, I've got to kill $x of $y!". "I've been doing this for an hour!". "Now I've got to go there!". Non-stop whining. The only positive things he ever says about his WOW playing are things like "I have X gold", or "I went up X levels this weekend".
Now as I said, I'm not a WOW player, or an MMORPG player at all, so I expect a lot of them are going to reply and tell me how wrong I am, but here's my theory. I think that some WOW players, like my house mate, do not actually enjoy playing the game. They enjoy the sense of achievement they get from having 70 levels and a shitload of virtual gold. The hours of grind required to get there are simply the price they have to pay to get that. That's why you hear so many players complaining about the "timesink". They aren't having fun. They just have to slog through it to pick up the next level.
Before you all start screaming at me, I'm not saying all MMO players are like this, just that I've noticed some are.
Your approach would tend to minimize the advancement of good ideas and encourage the advancement of bad ones.
I think you would find that his approach would minimize the advancement of poorly funded ideas and encourage the advancement of well funded ones. Their relative scientific worth would be largely irrelevant.
I think you missed his point. He wasn't saying it's not bloat, he was saying it probably has nothing to do with MS since, and I quote:
most of the adware/shareware/freeware has nothing to do with them
I mean, have you ever installed XP off a retail or corporate disc? There are virtually no apps installed. Most of the crap people complain about when they rant over free installs is actually installed by OEMs.
OK, try re-reading my post, and taking in what I'm saying. I expressly said he could rip and burn CDs on linux. The only obstacle he had was the vinyl thing. I pointed out he used a simple app with a point and click wizard, basically "click here to remove scratches". And you suggest he replace this with audacity, a pro level audio editing app. Does it have a "remove scratches button"?
Honestly, does the average person really need photoshop?
OK, stop right there. The average computer user does not exist. For example, take my dad. Most people would describe him as a fairly average user . He uses web and e-mail, writes the odd letter in word, and burns mp3s onto CDs for his car stereo. All of that could be done in Linux.
Oh, except he also records the odd vinyl album and cleans the scratches off it using a simple to use application with a step by step wizard for just that purpose. No equivalent program that I am aware of exists on Linux, so my Dad is stuck with Windows.
Or take the office were my wife works. She's a graphic designer, she regularly works on advertising campaigns that are sent to third party publications for printing. She absolutely requires photoshop, and yes, she has tried GIMP, and no, it really is not a suitable replacement for her.Now possibly the "average" office worker in her building could be moved to desktop linux ( I still think a lot of them would run into the "just one app" syndrome, but lets assume we could do it ), but my wife and quite a few other people could not, so the IT department would be stuck supporting two different systems, not a situation they would care for.
Linux is ready for the desktop. It just doesn't have the apps yet.
It's not a lie that most hardware works in Linux.
Absolutely correct. The vast majority of hardware you can buy today, as well as pre-existing older hardware, will work just fine under linux. However, the amount of hardware that will not work is far from insignificant.
I would guess (without evidence) that more currently existing hardware works on Linux than Windows.
Rubbish. If you had said windows vista rather than windows, then yeah, I might agree. But if we're talking about desktop hardware compatibility with XP, then certainly everything released in the last seven years should work fine. Not true of Linux. I hate to quote myself, but, as I said in another thread a while back :
I defy you to find any hardware on the shelves of a high street store that is not Windows XP compatible ( I have never used Vista, so in a break with Slashdot tradition, I'm not going to spout off about something I know nothing about). I'll bet you a months salary I can find something that won't work with Linux.
And you'll still need a 400 pound graphics card and 4 gigs of ram to render it.
So what?
I'm not aiming this at you specifically, but far too many OSS advocates think that an acceptable response to criticisms of Linux is to say "Windows is rubbish too".
I don't care. I'm not using windows.
Several people have posted in this thread this thread saying "windows won't play flash by default" or "windows doesn't have any drivers by default". Irrelevant. Linux is supposed to be better than windows. A defect in windows is not an excuse for having the same defect in Linux.
Do you know how drivers change gears in a formula one car (stay with me here)? I only found this out the other day, but apparently they change gears by pushing buttons mounted on the back of the steering wheel. It's far quicker, and means they don't have to take their hands off the wheel to make a gear change.
So, why do the rest of us still use gear sticks? Well, that would be because we all already know how to use them. Building a car with a different gear shift mechanism, even one that offered obvious advantages, would make it harder for most people to drive, so no one does. Most customers would look at it, and decide that they did'nt want to bother learning a new system.
You can see where I'm going with this, right? Windows IS the standard for using a computer. When an office job asks for "IT Skills", it really means "Windows Skills" If you actually want to capture a large market share, you have to make things easy for windows users.
And of course different is hard. It's hard because familiar is easy, so anything else is hard in comparison. I'm a developer, I'd find it a damn sight harder to code something in a programing language I'm not familiar with than I would in, say, C++ or Perl.
Now the truth is that this all matters less and less. standard OS GUIs are all slowly converging on one another. There are only so many ways to draw rectangles and lists of options to the screen. I'm typing this on Kubuntu 8.04. If i want to open a program I click on the button in the bottom left to bring up a list of apps. If I were using windows I would cl... well, you get the picture. I can already download a deb package and install it by double clicking, just like on windows.
BTW, to the inevitable smart arse who replies to this with an example of some car that changes gears clenching your buttocks, that does not disprove the analogy. Proving that 95 percent of cars out there DO NOT change gears using a stick mounted next to the drivers seat would disprove the analogy.
If the GUI were better, we'd be programming with them.
If the CLI were the superior interface, we'd be doing desktop publishing with it.
[End Sarcasm]
The superior interface is entirely determined by the job you're trying to do and the circumstances you're doing it under. You think a CLI is always better than a GUI? OK, I have a folder containing 300 images, and I need to copy all the ones with cars in them to another folder. I can do that with a GUI in under a minute ( thumbnails of images, ctrl+click, copy paste) Try it with a CLI.
And of course, apart from some jobs just being faster in a GUI, there's also the learning curve. I can set up a wireless network with iwconfig in about 10 seconds, way faster than using a GUI, but only because I already know what to type. If I was given a different CLI config tool for setting up wireless, I would have to read the man pages and learn a new set of commands. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I could figure out any wireless set up GUI in a matter of minutes. If I only need to do it occasionally, it's not worth the investment of time and effort to learn the CLI tool.
It's easy. And if you get stuck, I'm sure ubuntudupe will offer you a few tips on getting help and advice.
Yorkshire is not a city, you insensitive clod!
The town of Huddersfield, in the county of Yorkshire, is where the Yorkshire Terrier originated.
Well I don't have to chalk it up to chance. How about this explanation: A prophecy written hundreds of years ago says that Bob will speak a certain phrase at his execution. Bob knows this, so speaks the phrase at his execution. Of course, how do you even know christ said that on the cross? Your only source is the gospels, the earliest of which was written at least fifty years after the events it describes, and which were all authored by people who had a clear bias and were seeking to promote christian belief. I would also argue that it does NOT detail exactly what happened to him. It simply says his enemies had surrounded him and pierced his hands and feet. crucifixion had been a widespread method of execution for hundreds of years prior to christs time, so a reference, in a prophecy which offers no real detail, to someone being crucified, is hardly overwhelming evidence for christs divinity. And by the way, the Psalm is written in first person and makes no specific reference to christ. Just becaus you believe it refers to christ does not make it so. It might refer to David Koresh for all you know.
I am curious about something. You seem to believe in cristianity very strongly. Why christianity? After all, every claim you make about christianity (prophecies, prophets, changing history ) could be made for any number of religions, from Islam to Zoroastrianism. What makes you so sure your choice of invisible cloud being is correct, and all the others are wrong?
No. But evidence suggesting that the flat earth theory may be flawed is NOT evidence that the pyramid earth theory is correct.
Similarly, if you think there is a problem with the theory of evolution, that does not automatically make your alternate theory true.
The proof is Christ, a living being who lived here 2000 years ago. Whose humble life changed the course of human history(and the Roman empire)
Karl Marx's humble life changed the course of human history due to people following his teachings. Doesn't make him the son of an all powerful supernatural entity.
Since my original post spawned 22 replies, I decided to put together a quick follow up addressing some of the arguments they made..
I should probably point something out up front which I omitted from my earlier post: I do very little image editing, and what little I do is generally limited to removing some red eye or cropping a picture. The graphic designer in the family is my wife, who's work has adorned several nationally published add campaigns. If you think I dislike Gimp, talk to her.
To start with all the people who pointed out work-arounds, from separate virtual desktops to various window manager tricks, yes, all of those are possible ways to deal with the appalling choices the Gimp designers have made with their defaults, but the fact still remains that they should not be necessary. Make the default better. If I was actually in a position of being forced to work with the Gimp a lot, I would probably put it on its own virtual desktop, and set the palates to "Always on top". Whilst that is a solution, for an app to require its own virtual desktop, and some tweaking of the window manager to make the interface usable is, frankly, appalling.
A few people said that they actually like the Gimps interface, or at least that there are advantages to it. One guy said he liked it because it meant he could view an image in full screen without the palates in the way. I do appreciate that just because I prefer a particular interface, that does not necessarily make it better (quick, tell the Mac users), but when a program has a UI as unusual as the Gimp, it ought to at the very least come with an option to change to something more standard. The very fact that every time the Gimp is mentioned on Slashdot we see hundreds of posts complaining about the UI should be enough to suggest that a large proportion of the user base intensely dislike it.
Which brings me to my final point, namely why not use something else? The short answer is; because there is nothing else. GPL image editing software is pretty much limited to the Gimp. It's the default in every distro I've ever used, and nothing else even comes close. Someone mentioned Cinepaint, but I was under the impression that was geared specifically for film, correct me if I'm wrong. Krita might be a potential replacement one day, but my interest in it lasted exactly as long as it took me to find out that it had no crop tool.
Precisely because Gimp is the leading, nay default, image editor in the GPL/Linux world, it needs to have a more standardised default interface, or at least a straight forward option to switch to one.
Tune in next week, when we'll be talking about CMYK!
I was pointing out that if set the palates to "Always on top" I would have to manually minimize them to use another program.
My understanding is that the multi window interface is actually very similar to Photoshop on the MAC. Photoshop only has a single window MDI in windows. I could be wrong, but that's the way I understand it.
I think you are wrong.
I HATE the Gimp's GUI. Absolutely, completely despise it, and here's why. Say I have a bunch of apps open, browser, music player, my home folder, and Gimp. Now, the Gimp actually has three windows, The document window, the tool browser and the layers palate (actually it can have more than that, but that's the default). Now, let's suppose that I've finished reading slashdot, and I want to carry on editing my image, so I click on the taskbar button named "image.xcf". The image I was working on is maximized, but where are my editing tools? oh, they're still minimised. Back down to the taskbar, click on the GIMP button. OK, so I select the tool I want, but wait, I'm on the wrong layer. OK, back down to the taskbar, click on the Layers,Channels button, up pops the layer selector.
OK, so so far I've had to maximize three separate windows, just to be able to edit the image. But it gets even more annoying, because you can end up with the image over the top of the tool palates, so every time you want to go back and change a tool, you have to go back down to the taskbar and select the palate window again (or alt tab).
Now the reason I think you're wrong is because last time I posted a rant like this, two Mac users pointed out that Photoshop on the Mac does not work like this. Apperently, clicking on any image open in photoshop also brings the tools into focus as well. Of course I could be wrong as well, since I have no direct experience with Photoshop on Macs.
And before anyone points out that I could just set the palates to "Always on top", yes I could, and as a matter of fact I do, but it grates on me to have to work around a programs stupid defaults. Besides, I then have to manually minimize them if I want to use another program, and then manually bring them back up after clicking on an image window. Still annoying. Clicking an image in Gimp should bring the image up along with a full set of editing tools.
Sorry, I have specified repeatedly elsewhere in this thread that I am talking about XP.
The drivers for XP do not work in Vista
I did explicitly say I was talking about XP.
I actually had trouble with it since XP SP1)
How old is it? Because I also said seven years old or less. and SP1 was 2002, if memory serves, so it's at least seven years old if it's pre SP1.
Having said that, I do take your point. One massive benefit of open source is better support for older hardware. But that's not what I was arguing about. I explicitly excluded older hardware from my argument. What I was pointing out is that every piece of consumer hardware (with the obvious exception of Mac only stuff) you can buy today is supported under windows. That is not true of Linux.
Take the Apple Newton and Amiga as examples for complete abandoned systems that still have an active user base.
I know. I still have working A1200. And a working Speccy +3.